may 30

Grandma's funeral is today: I am dreading it. I dread Joe's brutality and I feel guilty that I didn't go and see her. This is the way I used to feel when we turned up at the Sunday school picnic when we hadn't been to Sunday school for the whole year, and I never wanted to go because I didn't think we had earned the right to stuff ourselves with jelly beans and pin the tail on the donkey. I don't want to be the sort of person who can always be counted on to appear for an Occasion, but doesn't want to perform any of the small acts of affection and attention that constitute real caring. It's the kind of behaviour I expect from men and Americans- the grand gesture at the expense of genuine effort.

To change the subject, on Saturday Daniel had a housewarming party in his new penthouse in the city, with all the frotting and leering and casual betrayal that you find at any drunken gathering but with a veneer of sophistication because conducted in high heels on the 25th floor. I'm ashamed to say I got earnest and was punished the next day by a blinding hangover which manifested as a combination of headache, nausea and general self loathing . And now off to the funeral.

may 28

Today is Joe's birthday, which he is probably spending with his own dying mother in her final rest stop in Picton. She won't know who he is, and if she does is incapable of saying so since she has recently had another stroke and can't even swallow. The four of them have decided to stop feeding her by force, but still it can take a long time to starve to death and in the meantime he is camped out in the southern highlands remembering- too late - mother's gifts of Ravel and Omar Khayyam, long interred beneath mother's curses of god and self-righteousness. As for us, it doesn't mean very much and I'm ashamed and somehow resentful of him for pushing us away from both him and her so that we don't know what to do except make flippant comments. We are as straitened by callousness as we would have been by grief, only instead of beating our breasts we mock because that's the only thing we can do without feeling like hypocrites. I'm horrified by the realisation that we've all colluded in a process of emotional cauterisation in order to please father: he has bestowed on us an immunity he really wanted for himself, and now we can't help him. Talking about it makes me uncomfortable so I am going to stop.

Having spent the better part of the last month inside staring at a computer screen, I had the revelation yesterday that it's no way to live, and I'm longing as I haven't for months to be off on my bike, smelling the road kill and eating the amoeba(s?ae?) of a foreign land. Currently sitting in the library trying to get a start on my grammar assignment, a text comparison of a prevaricating press release from Amanda Vanstones office and a slap on the wrist from Human Rights Watch officially condemning the detention of children- both involve manipulations of language that make my brain boil and I'm inclined to go home and vacuum the floor and think about it another time.

may 27

Aska in my dreams again, where she makes a periodic appearance- it's worth pointing out that she's always a benign presence (adjudicating crocodile races, talking to her friends on the phone) and that when there's an Other Woman, it's never her. This time I am staying in her house, which looks like a hotel and has at least 4 spare rooms. I am asleep in a huge bed and she comes and goes, wearing a blonde wig and purple blusher, wearing high heels and a suit. She is looking for a job and she tells me that she would like to work at Buckingham Palace because that way you get to know a lot of soldiers. We discuss the trials of job hunting, and how hard it is to go to an interview when you've forgotten what job it' s for. I peer into another room and see Monika sleeping there, a dark -haired hump. After a while Marcin comes. He has a fat friend with him who is carrying a magnesium bag, which is grey and plump just like his stomach and emits chalky puffs as he walks. Marcin gets into bed with me- he has no shirt and the entire surface of his back lies aganst my chest so close that it would be hard to slide a blade between us. I put my hands on his shoulders and feel ecstatic.

Then I am in Cambodia, in a barren, dusty no man's land. I am caught in coils of barbed wire and can't get free. Next to me is the entangled corpse of a woman who has obviously met the same fate. A man comes and cuts me down and carts me off to god knows where- I kill him with a knife, put on his clothes, and I am free. I feel strangely at home considering that I am blond, enormous and don't speak a word of the language. This is followed by another dream of capture , with a group of others. We are being carried off somewhere to be shot. I am in a state of suspended animation, thinking nothing much beyond a hope for intervention, which soon arrives in the form of an ageing white gunman with a face like a skull who appears from a swamp and guns down every one of our captors methodically and precisely but with a sorrowful look in his eyes. I can't help wondering (grateful though I am) if the intervention is any more morally laudable than the crime it prevented.

As winter tightens its grip it's getting harder to get out of bed: I ignore the alarm and burrow under the blankets, and find it necessary to decide what I'm going to wear before I move in order to prevent frozen vacillation in front of the cupboard. The dawn coffee ritual now takes place at Campos, which has an underwater feel and an Italian movie soundtrack- the only people around early on a weekday morning are the business crowd. Women in spike heels wade through ankle deep sunlight with their sombre escorts, trailing a cloud of perfume. Everybody is clean and beautiful and nobody is happy.
Now I'm off to show Jim Martin my complexes. To be continued.

may 26

Last night I went for a drink which turned into about 10 with Liz at the Sandringham, where we were accosted by two kiwis who work degging siwage detches at the earport (we hive a high security pass and iverytheng): mocking their accents was fun for about 5 minutes and then they became tiresome. I am busy developing a theory re: men in bars, which expresses the mathematical certainty that the less interesting they are, and the less you want to talk to them, the smaller the probability that they will ever go away. I want it to be simple and elegant but at the same time to account for fluctuating factors such as blood alcohol level, IQ and whether or not there is a state of origin match on television. Unfortunately it can't be expected to predict the likelihood of vomiting out the window later in the evening which is what Liz did when we got home.

I met Veronika and her son yesterday (I asked, what will you be wearing? and she said, a baby) and we went to eat cake in a cafe in Haymarket- relieved to find that she hasn't turned into Boring New Mother version 105, though we were distracted by his need to eat every ten minutes. Then I had coffee with Sally who started to tell me about the messages she receives from god and I spent the rest of the afternoon pondering why I don't consider her to be mentally ill and diagnosing Baby Jesus and Mohammad with schizophrenia.

Having a new cycle of marital doubts, this time brought on by an attempt to tell Marcinski a knock knock joke- culture and distance conspired against us and in the end I had to explain to him what a knock knock joke was and why this one was especially funny. It goes like this:
a: knock knock
b:who's there?
a: the interrupting cow
b: the interr-
a: MOOOOOOO
Unfortunately there wasa delay on messenger and the interrupting cow didn't actually interrupt, and anyway they don't have knock knock jokes in Poland. I decided not to divorce on thesde grounds after I tried it on two of my cultural contemporaries and got the following responses:
1
a;knock knock
b: who's there?
a: the interrupting cow
b: hahaha that's really funny

2
a: knock knock
b: who's there?
a: the interrupting cow
b: I don't get it.

may 25

Yesterday off to the linguistics factory on the north shore, to listen to kiwis talking to automated answering services, and try to unravel their accents. ictiviting pen code, for example. After fifteen attempts I finally figured it out and had to restrain myself from dancing around the room- the same feeling I get from working out the nine letter word from the grid when reading the weekend paper. So as you can see it's not totally devoid of job satisfaction.

Jack is pursuing me but I (bitter irony of life) am immune. Yes, I'm lonely and sexually frustrated, but he's the absolute last person who's going to profit from it. Instead I feel irritated and somehow sullied by his attentions, and slightly embarrassed, the way you do when somebody repeats a joke too often. I wonder if this is how he felt when I was pursuing him? horrid thought.

Still pawing through Jorge's blog with a mixture of pity, voyeurism and love of foreign literature. I spoke with Franki on the weekend and finally got a slightly more elaborated version of why she left Tony- his lack of interest in her internal life. Wait: I'm paraphrasing again. What she actually said was, I wanted him to ask me all sorts of questions that he never asked. So I'm compiling a log of unsatisfactory situations and behaviours-
fusion, codependencia, asking the wrong questions or just not asking. She gave me all the encouragement that a bitter cynic is likely to give and i ended up feeling that I had been patronised and my domestic fantasy dragged out of its dark cupboard and ridiculed in the market square.

may 22 pm

I was stopped in the middle of my torrent of words by the announcement of the library closing, and the flood of pasty students emerging from dark rooms, from behind bookshelves and computers, to stream through the doors like the rats after the Pied Piper, united in their rodent recognition of his musical talent. I wonder what he was playing. If i was a rat of Hamelin, the only thing that could make me follow irresistibly would be bad 80s disco music.

I gave a lesson to Lily today which consisted of reading book reviews from the paper- my Dysfunctional Grammarian, under the influence of caffeine, blue skies and an impending full moon accompanied me home in a daze usually only experienced in the early stages of a love affair consisting of equal parts bewilderment and adoration. Once arrived, however, he had to fight it out with the Bureaucrat and the Novelist, both demanding their 5 minutes of fame on my internal stage. (I don't know why but I know that the DG is a man) . If I were to try and predict the final outcome of this battle I would have to say that the Bureaucrat will probably win and that the DG will die of confusion and the Novelist of self consciousness. Here is \Marcin we are going to chat

may 22

Last night a dinner in honour of Liz's 21 st bit\rthday against the iconic backdrop of harbour bridge and opera house (so much Sydney that I didn't really believe I was here at all,) which left me bankrupt and with a great sympathy for the travails of transvestites who stand determinedly upright in fashionable bars in their killer heels as a matte r of routine, and not once every 21 years as I do. Unlike my tranny counterparts I didn't last the night and found myself mincing through the park with great relief on my way to my flannelette sheets at about 2 am- we had been to the Sly Fox karaoke the night before (Liz, Jack and I) for old times sake and I was labouring under a persistent seediness for most of the night. Jack by the way is mad as a meat axe and now that i have a Prospective Spouse has decided that he wants to have my babies-I'm not playing.

Thinking about my own 21st birthday, in the restaurant in Jerusalem. My co-slaves gave nme a lurid clock which I accepted with a performance that indicated I would be justified in pursuing a diplomatic career- I think that I worked a 13 hour day, coming home through the meat market around midnight and seeing a cat dragging a stolen liver stealthily into the shadows of the holy sepulchre. As always when I try to feel my younger self I have the sensation of running my hands through mist: and this is what it means to get older, a gain in density, a sense of solidification, the acquisition of accessories and habits that hold you closer to earth. At 21 I was unimpeded.

Now I'm not and this is the time for nostalgia- the summer is dying in a procession of sharp gold days so beautiful that I feel all the pain and loveliness of the world lying up against the frontier of my skin. Stranmge to remember that on the other side of the planet time is opening up and I am getting a vicarious whiff of spring down the wires from Warsaw where the sun is out and the vulgar European trees are putting on their party frocks. At this end, invece, I am retreating into fiction and flannie sheets and waiting for an unimaginable future to resolve itself on the horizon.

A sleepless night for the sake of functional grammar- sometimes I think it's lovely and elegant and explains the world and sometimes (now )I think that it's an instrument of torture invented by a cruel uncaring deity. Off to my death.

may 19

Last night I dreamt that I found a treasure cave at the top of a snow-bound mountain in India- it was full of beautiful (or maybe not, says my conscious aesthetic sense, since they resembled nothing more than Christmas baubles) pendants and earrings carved meticulously from greenish stone. And for the first time in a long time I dreamed a smell, the odor of these treasures: a calciferous smell like limestone, part metal, part salt.

On the pragmatic front, nobody is offering me either money or a job, which doesn't bother me unduly as I have no free time either to work or to spend. Thinking about the future, I have the sensation of conducting an exploration in reverse, standing on the frontiers of the known world (the 9 to five domesticated lands of strangeness) and feeling like Columbus about to fall off the edge of the planet.

Last night I watched Closer with Liz and felt my marital warning bells going off in all directions-four unlikeable characters (2 American, 2 British, if it matters) with too much time and not enough imagination, torturing each other for entertainment and only capable of loving what they don't have. I went straight home and called Marcinski- I wanted to ask, will we live happily ever after? but instead I just said goodnight and went to bed.

may 18

Yesterday I saw Dirty Rotten Jack who is back from tormenting his family in Lebanon- we went for a drink and I found that he doesn't register any more on my love radar. I have sprung back from the impression he made on me with the resilience of rising dough -into which, to extend the parallel, he stuck his finger without much interest or intention, just to see what would happen. There is sexual tension but it isn't mine - I had a minor (and not particularly welcome) revelation that despite the great intellectual advantages that a union with me could provide, he has only ever been interested in my body.

I have just been sitting for an hour listening to an aging man in a pink shirt lecture his beard on the greater transitivity of kicking dogs as opposed to drinking beer, and a further hour in front of the computer writing about politeness, a subject which interests me less and less as time goes by. Every day I have to fight my way through a crudescence of paper from which I am trying to extract something concise and elegant - if I had the energy I would make some gross generalisation about the waste generated by the creation of the most unimportant product, but I won't. Home instead to my spinster's larder with its tin of bean and bag of green sprouting potatoes- thank you and goodnight.

may 17

In Sydney it's raining and will not stop- I have the impression that the sickness of winter has begun and that this is a kind of celestial haemhorrage. I am suffering my first blogging dilemmas, first of all about the wisdom of doing it at all. Is it the literary equivalent of hanging your tits out in the jacuzzi (see Big Brother down under 2005)? On the ethical front, am I obliged to give aliases to the people that I know? Probably the wisest thing would have been to give myself an alias but since I have been keeping a diary for years hoping that somebody would do me a favour and read it and think what I wanted them to think about what I was thinking, I prefer to use my real name. Also because I'm tired of doing weekly google searches on myself and finding that in this incarnation I don't exist on the www- although I have a number of interesting alteregos including a country and western singer and a pro life anti-abortion pill activist.

may 17 5:30 pm

Back from a wasted trip to the north shore- it's been raining sporadically and unpredictably all afternoon and even sitting downstairs on the train, with a knee high view of the commuting hordes, it's still possible to identify the fashion victims by the sodden ugg boots that weigh down their feet like waterlogged rabbits. It's already dark and beginning to clear- the moon is out (half full) and about, multiplying itself in the puddles and it's hard to belive that days get shorter than this though I'm sure they would n ot agree in St. Petersburg.

So- where were we? Why did Edith leave Jorge? In my excavations I found this answer- she did not leave him. She left 'fusion and codependencia': she needed to live. About to step into the same tunnel from which they are just emerging, alone and shell shocked, I can't help wondering if it's bound to end like that. If, sooner or later, when you have shared the same air long enough, when you know the contours of what you will find when you stretch out your hand so well that it doesn't matter if it's there or not, does love stop augmenting you and start to diminish you instead? Will it happen one day, after 2 years, or 3, or 5, that I start to stay awake all night, gathering the leftovers of space and time that nobody wants in order to have something that belongs only to me? Will Marcinski and I revert to the irrational mathematics of embryos, where one and one still only make one?

In the interests of building an enduring love, I am colonising this small piece of cyberspace in advance, so that I always have a place of my own. I don't want the love nest and the lovely Polish face on my pillow to fill my horizons until one day I decide that it's obscuring my view, and I don't want to be driven mad by peace and comfort until even pain seems like an improvement, because at least it carries some intensity. If it ends let it be for a better reason, defeated by the pragmatics of language or money rather than by the perversions of human nature which always wants what it hasn't got.

may 16

I am inaugurating this in honour of my friend Jorge who has just been abandoned by the great love of his life and is blogging his broken heart out in a Parisian Mc Donalds, all unaware that there is a cyber pervert on the other side of the world who is scratching about on the surface of an unknown language trying to build an anatomy of pain and reading conjugal warnings in his every word. Because I am about to embark on my own personal attempt at marital bliss I'm taking them seriously. It's still strange to be writing a diary in a public place so that's all for today- I don't want to give away all my secrets at once (or actually other people's secrets since I obviously don't have a life if I have to spend my time deciphering maudlin Spanish posts in order to keep myself entertained.)